Part Two 23rd January 2004 January 2004

364 Pages·2010·6.95 MB·English

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IBSA (ISKCON Bhaktivedanta Sadhana Asrama), Govardhana, India
23 January 2004
Chicken Soup (and frogs' legs, snails, and martinis) for the Soul
The reader may be aware that there's a New Age sort of book published not long ago
with the title Chicken Soup for the Soul. Since then a string of sequels was put out
by the same author. Well, here I'm not writing about that book. The review you're
about to read in today's journal is about a book that was published in magazine form
in the late 1950's and then in book form in 1961. Though nearly fifty years old, the
book is remarkably New Age-y in a folksy American way. It even has something to
say about the spiritual significance of chicken soup.
But if it's the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you're missing
out on every single [expletive deleted] religious action that's going on around this
house. You don't even have sense enough to drink when somebody brings you a cup
of consecrated chicken soup--which is the only kind of chicken soup [Mother] ever
brings to anybody around this madhouse. . . How in hell are you going to recognize a
legitimate holy man when you see one if you don't even know a cup of consecrated
chicken soup when it's right in front of your nose?
The name of the book is Franny and Zooey. The author is J. D. Salinger, whose
Catcher in the Rye I wrote about last summer in this journal. Somewhere, years ago,
HH Satsvarupa dasa Gosvami discussed Franny and Zooey, but what I have to say
does not refer to his remarks.
The title characters, Franny (for Francis) and Zooey (for Zachary) are sister and
brother in a large New York family called Glass. The Glass family figures prominently
in Salinger's fiction; in 1948, for instance, he published a short story, "A Perfect Day
for Bananafish," in which Seymour Glass, Franny and Zooey's eldest brother, plays in
the sea with a little girl and then goes back to his beachfront hotel to shoot himself
in the head.
Anyway, for a book published nearly fifty years ago, the central theme of Franny and
Zooey is quite interesting--yes, interesting even for Hare Krsna devotees. The
Franny part of the book saw print in 1955 in The New Yorker magazine; thus ten
years before Srila Prabhupada arrived in New York, people in that city were reading
about Francis Glass, a modern American college girl who committed herself to chant
the Jesus Prayer constantly. (For more about the Jesus Prayer, see In2-MeC of 24
December 2003. ) Franny's inspiration was a little book called The Way of a Pilgrim.
Quite a number of Hare Krsna devotees have read this book too. If you've read it,
you know it's about a Russian peasant who walks from holy place to holy place
around Russia of the 1800s, taking only bread, salt and water for nourishment, while
constantly chanting "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. "
The chanting of the Jesus Prayer is a practice most known in Eastern Orthodox
Christianity, although Catholicism has a place for it too. The practice has its root in a
New Testament injunction, "Pray without ceasing. " It is expounded upon in The
Philokalia, a collection of quotations from early Fathers of the Church. Sample:
Those who meditate unceasingly upon this glorious and holy name in the depths of
their hearts can sometimes see the light of their own intellect. For when the mind is
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closely concentrated upon this name, then we grow fully conscious that the name is
burning up all the filth which covers the surface of the soul; for it is written: Our God
is a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24). Then the Lord awakens in the soul a great love for
His glory; for when the intellect with fervour of heart maintains persistently its
remembrance of the precious name, then that name implants in us a constant love
for its goodness, since there is nothing now that stands in the way.
The practice of chanting the Jesus Prayer is to be taken up under the instruction of a
spiritual master. In The Way of a Pilgrim, the peasant begins his chanting with the
blessings of a starets, an elderly religious teacher. Franny, speaking in a restaurant
to her boyfriend Lane, explains:
. . . the starets tells the pilgrim that if you keep saying that prayer over and over
again--you only have to just do it with your lips at first--then eventually what
happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while. I don't
know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the
person's heartbeats, and then you're actually praying without ceasing. Which has a
really tremendous, mystical effct on your whole outlook. I mean that's the whole
point of it, more or less. I mean you do it to purify your whole outlook and get an
absolutely new conception of what everything's about.
A bit later Franny says:
I just think it's a terribly peculiar coincidence that you keep running into that kind of
advice--I mean all these really advanced and absolutely unbogus religious persons
that keep telling you if you repeat the name of God incessantly, something happens.
Even in India. In India, they tell you to meditate on the 'Om,' which means the same
thing, really, and the exact same result is supposed to happen.
It seems that Franny has reached a crisis in her life, much as Holden Caulfield came
to a breaking point in Catcher in the Rye. But whereas Holden ends up in an
institution for the psychologically disturbed, Franny takes up chanting the Jesus
Prayer. About her frustrations with life around her, she says:
Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even
stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and--sad-making. And the worst
part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as
much as everybody else, only in a different way.
Lane is concerned. Not just by Fanny's babbling about how empty life is, nor that
she's taken up the Jesus Prayer--but she's pale and moody. She has a headache and
no appetite. She even faints in the middle of the restaurant. Later, when they're
alone, he suggests her troubles are because they haven't had sex for a month.
Which may be a hidden joke by Salinger, since--though it is never stated openly--
some of Franny's symptoms indicate that she is pregnant. It's been said,
"Motherhood is the cause of all the world's problems. " If Franny is becoming a
mother, then it was sex with Lane that put her in that condition. Yet lusty Lane
thinks having sex with him again will pull her out of her condition.
At lunch in the restaurant Franny drinks a martini. She orders a chicken sandwich
but has no appetite to even take a bite. Lane has a martini too, and while she's
preaching to him about the Jesus Prayer, he tucks into frogs' legs, snails, and salad.
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I've read The Way of a Pilgrim, and I remember that the pilgrim was firm in his diet
of renunciation--bread and water only. He even refused fish offered him by a pious
Christian family. People my age remember when Catholics didn't eat meat on
Fridays; but fish was a bona fide substitute. Yet even fish was too worldly for this
pilgrim committed to unceasing prayer. Salinger doesn't develop this line of thought
at all. Another thing is, he has all his characters smoking like chimneys from the
novel's beginning to its end.
In "Zooey," the second part of the book, Franny's at home. Her slightly older brother
Zooey comes to counsel her at the urgings of their mother Bessie. Franny won't eat.
She took only two spoonfuls of Bessie's chicken soup for the soul. Her lips are
constantly moving in prayer.
It's this talk Zooey has with Franny that I find annoying. From what I've read about
him, Salinger was a home-made Buddhist, as were other 1950's American authors
and poets like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Kerouac etc. were
Beats, but Salinger didn't hang out with them; he was a recluse. Anyway, Zooey
means to undermine Franny's new-found dedication to the Jesus Prayer, and there is
a voidistic thrust to his arguments.
As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that I can see, between the
man who's greedy for material treasure--or even intellectual treasure--and the man
who's greedy for spiritual treasure. . . it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the
world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as
the rest of us are.
Now, in the next quotation Salinger, through the mouth of Zooey, seems to be
dabbling in that paradoxical line of thought found in Zen Buddhism: that the material
world, when seen rightly without ego, is perfect.
. . . there are nice things in the world--and I mean nice things. We're all such
morons to get so sidetracked. Always, always, always referring every [expletive
deleted] thing right back to our lousy little egos.
In one of his hit songs of the 'sixties, pop star Donovan sang a line from Zen
Buddhist philosophy: "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then
there is. " Which means before enlightenment one sees a mountain as everybody
else sees it. Then at the moment of satori (the Zen state of peak insight), the
mountain fades into nothingness. After satori, the mountain is seen once again--but
not as the unenlightened egoist sees it. It has become, to use Zooey's words, a
really nice thing of the world.
All right. At this point Pandit Quibblebrain might pipe up, "But devotees also see the
material world differently in Krsna consciousness. Srila Prabhodananda Sarasvati
writes, visvam purna-sukhayate, 'the whole world becomes bliss' for a devotee who's
been blessed by Mahaprabhu's mercy. "
Yeah, but chicken soup? Consecrated chicken soup? Murgi-rasam prasad?
Franny wants to renounce. She was an aspiring actress, but now she's quit her
college theater. What's more, she's decided to quit college altogether. She realizes
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she doesn't love Lane. Her mind is following the Russian pilgrim, and it seems her
body will soon follow too. Zooey wants her to drink Bessie's consecrated chicken
soup, get back into theater, continue her studies, get on with her life as it was. It
comes down to this:
You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that
the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll
ever move an inch. Detachment. . . and only detachment. Desirelessness. 'Cessation
from all hankerings. ' It's this business of desiring, if you want to know the [expletive
deleted] truth, that makes an actor in the first place. Why're you making me tell you
things you already know? Somewhere along the line--in one damn incarnation or
another, if you like--you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to
be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of
your own hankerings. Cause and effect. . . cause and effect. The only thing you can
do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to--be
God's actress, if you want to.
Pandit Quibblebrain is all excited. He's bursting to point out that similarly, Bhagavad-
gita teaches us to be detached and engage our karma in the service of the Lord.
Indeed, Salinger has Zooey read the Bhagavad-gita to prepare himself for his
onslaught on Franny's resolve to renounce everything and just chant.
You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the
fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working.
Never give way to laziness, either. Perform every action with your heart fixed on the
Supreme Lord. . .
Still, there's a difference between what
this passage of the Gita instructs and
what Zooey says to Franny. The Gita
emphasizes acting in devotion to the
Supreme Lord. Zooey tells Franny that
the main thing that counts is
detachment and only detachment. "If
she wants to" she can act for God. If she
wants to. The main thing is to not act for
herself and thus become one of those
world-hating, unattractive saints greedy
for spiritual treasure.
Zooey's final argument so annoys me I
shall not quote it. I'll just give a
summary. He urges her to act (in both
senses of general activity and acting on
stage), and to act well, not merely

apathetically, by imagining a sickly fat
The Gita emphasizes acting in devotion to
lady out in the audience who is
the Supreme Lord.
depending up Franny to lift her out of

her depression. "Be funny for the Fat
Lady. " It turns out that everybody in the world is that fat lady. In the end the fat
lady is God. "And don't you know--listen to me, now--don't you know who that Fat
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Lady really is?" Zooey asks Franny urgently. ". . . It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself. .
. "
Work is worship. The poor man in the street, the sickly fat lady sitting at home next
to her radio, are God. God means a whole world full of poor daridra-narayanas in
need of consecrated chicken soup.
Not this rascaldom, daridra-narayana. Just like one rascal has manufactured this
daridra-narayana. The poor man has become Narayana, and the goat Narayana is
killed for their feeding. Not this kind of sadhu. Suhrdam sarva-bhutanam. A sadhu
will not allow any kind of killing. See in the Christian religion, it is first injunction is
"Thou shalt not kill. " If you want to become religious. . . They are simply killing, and
still, they are claiming "Christian. "
Shall I say more? I don't think it's worth it. Though I did like reading about self-
activated chanting of the Lord's holy name, which is really our goal, isn't it?

Sketches of a Devotee's Pre-Krsna Conscious Life in India
Back in the late 1980's I tape-recorded a series of interesting stories told me by an
Indian devotee, whom I shall not name to protect his privacy. These stories relate
his life as a young man from a South Indian smarta brahmin family, and trace how
he gradually turned away from material life to Krsna consciousness. What you will
read below begins in the holy town of Haridwar.
A pretty town of temples and lodges clustered where the Ganges surges out of the
hill country into the plains, Haridwar draws swarms of Hindu and Sikh pilgrims from
all over India who attend the sunset ceremony at Har Ki Pairi, a sacred spot on the
west bank. Votive lamps are set afloat in the river, sometimes so many that for half
an hour it seems the Akashganga (Celestial Ganges) has descended from heaven to
earth, bringing all the stars down with it.

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After the ceremony, the Har Ki Pairi
bankside and the footbridge that crosses
from it to the other side teem with
beggars, thieves, lodge agents,
dealmakers, charlatans, pimps--and the
herd that is fleeced by them. As a sadhu
cynically told me, "Those who have
washed off their sins by bathing in the
holy waters are rushing out of the Ganges
to commit new sins, and those who have
not yet washed off their sins are rushing
to get themselves good and dirty before
bathing. "

Dressed as a holy man, I had no difficulty
Evening arati to the Ganga at Har Ki Pairi
in getting an evening meal once the
in the holy city of Haridwar.
ceremony had ended. I simply stood on
the footbridge waiting for some moneyed soul to come along who was looking to get
relieved of some sin by feeding a sadhu. The standard fare was milk, puris and
halvah, served up at any number of food stalls nearby. I found it wasn't very hard to
convince my patrons that I was a budding Godman. Some were desperate, ready to
believe anything that might help them turn their lives around.
In Haridwar I saw the truth of Sai Baba's prophecy that he and I would meet again,
and that I myself would 'become God. ' It happened when a patron took me to a
gathering of Sai Baba followers. I did all the moves I'd learned at Shanti Niketana, I
sang Chitta Chora and other songs, and my mystic tube played magic upon their
minds. There were murmers through the crowd: "Baba has come!" Afterwards a man
came to me with tears streaming down his face. "I was not fortunate enough to go to
Puttaparthi, but seeing you I feel that Puttaparthi has come to me. " I told him that I
really had nothing to do with that place.
"Yes you do, Swamiji, because you are a mahatma, an all-pervading soul. You are
linked to everywhere, including Puttaparthi. You are in Baba, and Baba is in you. Be
honest with us, Swamiji. You are God. Why hide it?"
As at Shanti Niketana, I vacillated between upright idealism and willfull deception in
my dealings with such people, who seemed to be everywhere in Haridwar. My
conscience reminded me that when I was in the TVS accounting department I could
have swindled huge sums away, but it was against my principles. Why should I
become a cheater after having taken to spiritual life? The wicked side of my mind
nagged, 'These people want to be defrauded. If they don't come to me, they'll go to
someone else. All I want is my maintenance, not their riches. If I can help them by
increasing their faith in something, let me. There's no harm. They are suffering. "
A lady schoolmistress of about fifty years of age let me use a schoolroom for the
week I stayed in Haridwar. Thinking her pious and intelligent, I confided in her about
my dilemma. "I left TVS only two months ago. I am just a beginner in spiritual life,
but sometimes I get visions in my mind. People take this as a sign of my divinity.
But the fact is I have no control over these visions. All I have done as a sadhu is
stayed for a few weeks in Rishikesh. I don't even have a guru. I'm just a fool. "
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But she argued, "Shivananda, Bhagat Singh, Aurobindo and so many others were the
same way. They were ordinary men who stumbled into being God. You just have to
flow along with the divine current wherever it takes you, like a lamp in the Ganges,
and you will end up as God. "
I tried to see some sense in her advice. But after a few days I discovered she was
having a secret love affair with a Haridwar guru. Without a further word to her I
vacated the room and went to Daksha Mahadeva temple at Kankal, four kilometers
away. There I met with Anandamayi Ma, the famous yogini. At the time I saw her,
she was ill and bedridden, being attended by her young female disciples.
Some sixty years old, her hair worn long and loose, Anandamayi Ma was dressed in
flowing saffron and sat upon a saffron-draped bedstead. Though in poor health, she
was still receiving guests in the afternoon. I entered with a foreign couple from
Europe. After speaking with her briefly, they left; she then turned to me and said,
"Anand ho (let there be bliss). Are you happy?"
"No," I admitted.
"Everywhere there is happiness, so why are you are not happy?"
I said, "You may have happiness, mataji, but has not come my way. "
She told the young servant girl to go out and make up a plate of lunch for me. "The
thing is," she continued, "you're trying for things that are not necessary. You've gone
here and there, searching, searching. But ananda is right there in the heart. "
"Look, mother," I said, "I started out with tantra. That caused the whole trouble--
visions and mental disturbances. Then I got bewildered by a South Indian siddha-
yogi, Brahmendra Sarasvati, who is not even in this world any longer yet could exert
a powerful influence over my mind. Then I went to Aurobindo. "
She broke in, chuckling. "Then you went mad. You left your job, you went to
Tirupati, you've even gone up to Neelkanth Mahadev. And you'll go on like this for a
long time. You are attracted to siddhis, powers. In your previous lifetimes you
developed siddhis, but now you've only a little power, psychic power, left. You should
kick this nonsense away. Then you'll find your real path to ananda. "
"Ma, please remove my wrongheaded ideas of spiritual life. Take me off this wrong
path, put me on the right one. I need guidance. "
She sighed. "You say that to every yogi you meet. Guidance. . . I never guided
anyone. People follow me, but I'm not leading them. They just know that they should
follow. But you are looking for someone to lead you, to convince you--and to save
you. All I can tell you is, you are saved through purity. If you forget that and just
use up your time looking for someone who is powerful, who'll just touch you on the
head and remove your all your troubles so that you won't have to do anything to
save yourself, you'll be cheated again and again. But you know this already. People
come to you for blessings, and you know they are foolish. So don't come to me for
that. Anyway, what you've been seeing up here is just meant to make you disgusted.
Saaf nahi he--so many of these people, leaders and followers alike, they are not
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clean. Austerity and cleanliness clears the way to ananda. So kindly go down now
and take your lunch. "
I went back to Haridwar. While bathing in the Ganges I saw a baba in water over his
nose. He was doing a technique called akamashana-japa. Bubbles rose to the surface
from his mouth as he chanted his mantra, but he did not raise his nose above the
water for air. This went on for half an hour.
When he came out of the water, I asked, "Swamiji, what mantra do you chant?"
"Mantra and guru should be kept secret," he said as he dried himself with a gamcha.
"But sadhus should teach others, isn't that so? I want to learn how to do
akamashana-japa also. "
He looked at me and shook his head. "How many different things do you want to do?
Now you chant Vishnu-sahashra nama, you do trotak, and you think by adding more
you'll get more. But more of what are you trying to get? Your goal is not even known
to you. "
"Babaji Maharaja, what I need is a guru. Why don't you become my guru? You seem
to know me through and through. "
"This is another problem you have. You think that because I or someone else can see
a few things about you that we must be your gurus. You are attracted to the unreal.
You should give all this up and concentrate on the truth. The real mantra is
Bhagavad-gita, if you can understand and follow it. "
"But I can't be satisfied with only that. "
"Hah! So you think I am satisfied standing underwater chanting my mantra? If I was
satisfied, I wouldn't be doing this. "
The mystic tube in my head buzzed and flickered. I suddenly blurted, "Swamiji, you
are chanting the Maha-mrtyunjaya mantra. "
"See?" he said. "Now you are doing it to me. So what is so wonderful about peering
into someone's mind?"
"I just came from Anandamayi Ma. You're just telling me the same things she did. "
He grinned for the first time. "We're all on the same frequency around here. Our
minds interchange on a platform above the gross senses, like radio communication.
Some are more powerful, so they generate signals, like radio transmitters. The rest
of us are receivers. We all share the same messages. But the messages we send and
receive are not ours. That comes from higher up. You, you're just a small fry
bouncing between us. You wander around, get an experience here, an intuition
there, but that is the limit of your participation in our network. Garbled signals fading
in and out of your head--that's all you can pick up. You're not meant to play this
game. You should get out of it while you can. Otherwise you'll just lose your mind to
some higher power and become his speaker. Behind eveyone you see up here, no
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matter how great they are, there is someone greater from whom he gets his power,
and he's being manipulated by that power. "
"So how I will ever see the truth, with all this going on?"
"Well, I'm just telling you that this is what goes on up here. Be very careful whom
you choose to follow. Remember, the world is full of fools, and fools follow fools. A
foolish guru will be popular--he has a whole world of fools for disciples. And a sage
will have disciples who are sages, because only sages will follow him. But real sages
are hard to find. "
I touched his feet and he blessed me. Then he went on his way.
I returned to Rishikesh. I went to the Shrinivas Mandir, a branch of the Tirupathi
temple. Next to it stands the Andra Ashram where prasad is served to pilgrims.
There I saw a shaven- headed sadhu with twelve Shri Vaishnava tilak marks on his
body. Most sadhus in Rishikesh have beards and long hair, and if they wear tilak at
all, they wear the three lines of Shiva.
He was a South Indian, so we started talking in Tamil. I told him, "I am really
disappointed that Rishikesh has turned out to be such a useless place for spiritual
life. I expected to find great sadhus, but mostly all I've seen is commercialism. If I
do meet a real yogi, he won't share anything. "
He said, "You haven't missed much. Even if the strict yogis took you on as their
disciple, all they could teach you is, 'The truth is yourself. '"
"What do you mean?"
"You'll find different standards of practice among different yogis, but their philosophy
is all the same: 'everybody is God, and you must just realize yourself to become
God-realized. ' To overturn that idea, Shri Ramanujacharya came. He started alone,
opposed by everyone, because at that time the whole of India believed that man
himself is God. Even Ramanuja's own brother, Govinda, was just the type yogi you'll
find up here, thinking he himself has become Shiva. But Ramanuja brought Govinda
and many others to the right path. He taught what the Alwars taught long before.
The Alwars were the greatest of yogis. They had real power, not just cheap magic,
but their conclusion was kandu konden narayana yennum namam: 'Finally I've found
that the name of Narayan (Vishnu) is the ultimate Truth. ' They pursued yoga to its
furthest limit and found that without bhakti, devotion to God, there is no way to be
satisfied with the self alone. You are also not satisfied with yourself. That's why you
are looking for someone to devote yourself to, to serve, to take shelter of. "
I had to admit that on that count, he was right. I had always felt distant from the
Shri Vaishnava doctrine before. It seemed so restrictive to me. But today I listened
for three hours to this sadhu, and much of what he said I could now appreciate. The
Vaishnavas truly had insights into the deep needs of the soul.
I asked him, "But why are you up here? The Shri Vaishnavas stay in the south. I've
not met any sadhus who follow your line in Rishikesh or Haridwar. "
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